The Mixtape ft. Rock Climbing, Jigsaw Puzzles, & eSports

It’s been an overwhelming week for the news and editorial writers out there. So we figured, let’s mix up the mixtape and just talk about really cool or fascinating things that struck us. This week is much less long form writing and research and more of just cool things we have seen or are thinking about.

You probably heard about this feat of pure insanity. Last week, climber Alex Honnold scaled Yosemite’s towering El Capitan without a rope. You don’t have to be a climber to understand how incredible this climb was and how huge of an achievement it is for professional climbers around the world. Something this massive is quite literally life or death, and that’s something we don’t often deal with. This is a particularly interesting perspective of a close friend of Alex’s as he scaled the face of El Capitan knowing that any error would be his last.

Yeah… that photo, that’s a puzzle. Something that triggered some interest from a few of us here, this jigsaw puzzle is quite remarkable. This article on Fast Co dives deeper into how this puzzle isn’t just challenging, it changes the way in which we solve it. You can’t just look at a picture and mentally place where you think a piece belongs in an image. You have to carefully understand the relationship between each piece and how they mesh together to create a spectrum.

This got tossed in the mix as something that we will likely see growing over the next several years. Competitive gaming is experiencing a massive resurgence and is quickly becoming mainstream. No longer is nerddom something to be ashamed of. If you are an incredibly talented League of Legends player, there’s probably a way you can make a good living with that skill. Polygon, a growing publication in the video game industry announced that they are launching similar blogs and fan pages for three major esports events. It may not seem like a huge deal yet, but it’s a clear indicator of what is to come of the gaming industry.